It all started a couple of months ago when there was a rumor flying through the blogosphere about Google penalizing blogs for selling links. Many bloggers took this information as a mere rumor but little did we all know that Google was very serious about stopping paid link activities around the Internet.
The main reason for Google’s hatred towards commercial link trade was that the activity was giving advertisers a way to manipulate Google Pagerank.
Google Pagerank is a pure technology algorithm created by Google that calculates the importance of a web page based on the inbound and outbound links. The activity of selling/buying paid links was basically interfering with Google’s Pagerank technology and therefore Google decided to take action against the sites/blogs that were a part of this activity.
Google penalized some high profile blogs recently as an action towards stopping paid link activities around the blogosphere. Some blogs have even reported a decrease in their search engine traffic however for most of them its just the drop in their blog Pagerank. Here is a list of high profile blogs which supposedly lost Pagerank on this issue:
- Engadget (from 7 to 5)
- Problogger (from 6 to 4)
- Copyblogger (from 6 to 4)
- Quick Online Tips (from 6 to 3)
- Blog Herald (from 6 to 4)
- Weblog Tools Collection (from 6 to 4)
- Coolest Gadgets (from 5 to 3)
- CyberNet News (from 6 to 4)
and today Sizlopedia itself became a victim of the Google Pagerank terror and experienced a Pagerank drop (from 5 to 3). Its hard to say whether Google is right on this or not but this is really a striking issue for all of us.
Sizlopedia is the creation of Saad Hamid, a tech enthusiast from Pakistan who started this blog in 2007.
Oh My PR dropped too. But I think PR doesn’t mean nothing.
This particular Google update has had greater repercussions…
My site, TFTS, experienced the -1 PR drop affecting many sites which is another issue not related to paid links )TFTS does not have paid links in any form).
Curiously though, a secondary, new site of mine that has only to main inbound links shot up from a 0 to a 4.
I can only assume that Google have looked at the links page on TFTS and have penalized me for having some unrelated sites listed there.
Either ways, you just have to read any webmaster forum to see the shockwaves and the resulting fallout. That said, traffic levels remain unaffected - indeed, if anything, they are showing a marked increase.
Unrelated, but the search box on right sidebar is extending, and messing up the theme. I’m on 1280×1024.
Many blogs have become victims of Google’s PR hunt, with this Google also has started regular PR update.
This has happened routinely over the past several years. There are so many new websites entering the WWW, and the older websites keep racking up more PR, that eventually, Google has to recalibrate its toolbar rankings to make it more meaningful. I haven’t lost any traffic from Google, and my sites still seem show up in the same places. This is just a mathematical adjustment.
I have mixed results:
Only one of my websites went from PR2 to PR1
But other websites and blogs went up PR2 to PR3
and one website where I am promoting my own free software and hosted only 2 months back is now PR3 from PR0
My blog increase to PR 4 rather then slipping… i expected a PR 5 thou. But atleast its better then nothing.
My site was PR5 but drops to N/A. so sad…
I got a PR4 from PR0 and some internal pages PR6… amazing isn’t it! I just wrote a post about this high PR for internal pages, probably someone of you can put some light on it..
By the way, CyberHackz, just check out if Google still indexes your site pages…
This update has confused the heck out of me lol. I see you’re tweaking your design buddy. Looking good.
Even i am getting confused by this. Sometimes mine is being displayed as 3 and sometimes as 4.
Have you checked the PR at all Google datacenters Madhur?
I got PR 3 from N/A
I have read that Google had dropped the PR due to usage of text link ads by blog owners
LOL, everyone got a drop
I went from PR 0 to 4 
God, mine had gone to N/A too, I hate the fact that they have to reduce our PR’s just because we monetize our blogs. What’s the catch anyway? They do the same thing, too I guess on their ‘other’ websites perhaps. Damn, it makes me go all crazy.
Google is the future of the web so it is very important for publishers to remain at Google’s side whether they are right or wrong.
I had been victim of the Google penalization as well, but I could overcome it and I tried to explain what all I did for getting my Page rank back from Google